What is Sitemap and Importance of sitemap in SEO

Sitemap is an easy way to allow a webmaster to inform search Engine Crawler about the URLs on a website or blog that are available for crawling. Sitemap is an XML file include website URLs along with additional details about each URL.
Over the past couple of posts I have explained about various on page parameter. Today I will explain here the what is sitemap and the importance of sitemap.

There are two sitemaps are used, one is XML and another is HTML. XML sitemap for humans and xml sitemap for spider/Crawler/bots.
sitemap.xml 

  Sitemap.xml is particularly beneficial for that website who have:
 1 Some URLs of website are not available through browse able interface
 2 if the website have a large number of URLs then sitemap will help for search Engine crawler
 3 When a website have few external links 4 Webmaster uses rich Ajax, Flash content this is not normally processed by Search Engines.

Sitemap Benefits:


  • Sitemap includes all URLs of website so all the urls are easily available to search Engine crawler
  • Sitemap also provide crawling priority information to search Engine by an optional tag 
  • Lastmod and changefreq two other tags pass information to the search engine about when the page was last modified and how often the page is likely to change.
  • If your website has a sitemap then Google webmaster also gives useful information like crawl per day, crawl rate etc.

Sitemap.xml Format :

Sitemap.xml consists of XML Tags . I will put together here the sitemap.xml format with all addition tags:
?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
    <url>
        <loc>http://abc.com/</loc>
        <lastmod>2015-05-06</lastmod>
        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
        <priority>0.5</priority>
    </url>
</urlset>

Note:
  • Sitemap must be in UTF-8 Format and cannot be more than 10 MB large or 50000 URLs.
  • You can also add sitemap location in Robots.Txt file by adding the following line to robots.txt 

           Sitemap: <Sitemap_Location>
           Sitemap_location  should be the complete URL of sitemap Location such as                                          http://abc.com/sitemap.xml      

How to Generate and Submit Sitemap ?

First of all you need to create sitemap and then upload it to the website.
You will create sitemap by two methods. 
  • First one is Download and install sitemap generator. Also need to configure it. This method is quite difficult.
  •  Second sitemap generator method is easy. You will create sitemap by online sitemap generator sites.
Steps to follow while generate online Sitemap:
1.      Open any sitemap generator site. Such as https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ 

2.      Fill the required details such as website url for which you want to crate sitemap, crawling Priority, page update frequency and Click on Start Button.

3.       When the sitemap is generated then download the sitemap.


4.      Now next step is to upload sitemap on website by using FTP or any other website admin access.
5.      After uploading the sitemap, open the website webmaster account and click on submit sitemap.


In this way you can easily generate, upload and submit to Google 

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